They saw the sign, they said, and so made bold to enter. Evidently Miss Perkins was a prim, thin, tall, spectacled, New England old maid. She had the delicate air and manner of a lady. A lady faded, perhaps, and unused to a larger social area than that surrounding her native village green. She had also the timid manner of hesitancy of New England spinsters—hesitancy concerning everything except questions of casuistry and religion—and seemed, in what she did, to be spurred on from behind by the niece, who was, on the whole, as Mr. Jerome Archibald told a friend at the club later, “quite extraordinary.”
In the first place, as he said, the niece was undeniably beautiful.
“She wore rawther an odd street dress,” he said, “made up in the country somewhere, by a seamstress who gathered her crude notions of the prevailing fashions from some prevaricating ladies’ journal, and her hat was something positively ridiculous—but her face!” The fastidious Mr. Jerome Archibald at once conceded to it a certain patrician quality of elegance. It denoted pure blood and pure breeding, somewhere up among Vermont hills or Maine forests. A long line of “intelligent ancestors,” perhaps. It was fine, and—beautiful. The forehead high, nose straight, the large eyes gray, the mouth and chin sweet, and yet quite determined. When he showed them a large room at the rear, on the second story, facing the north, the niece had observed, with a lofty air—mind, the room was literally crammed with the most costly bric-à-brac—“I think this will suit me very well, aunt dear, on account of the light.”
He noticed in her unfashionable dress a certain artistic sense of freedom, a soupçon of colored ribbon here and there, and he concluded that she was all the more interesting, as an artist, in that she so quietly accepted the elegancies around her. She gave an unconscious sigh over a small glass-covered “Woodland Scene,” by Duprez. Mr. Jerome Archibald noticed it, and inwardly smiled, delighted.
Perhaps the niece captivated him the more by her silent appreciation of some things he himself admired exceedingly. It was odd that she seemed always to choose his favorites. There was nothing said as to the rent, the size of the house, the lot, the plumbing. He spent an hour showing his etchings alone, and in the afternoon, at four, they were coming again, “to decide.”
II.
Of course Mr. Jerome Archibald must have been an extremely susceptible young man to have fallen in love at first sight with a strange young woman, who had come to look at his house with a view to renting. But he was—“rawther down and depressed.” The usual summer malaria had set in. The usual excavations in the streets were going on—they were digging with “really extraordinary energy” that summer—the pavements were up on all the Fortieth streets. Fifth Avenue presented the appearance of a huge empty canal. It was something more, this presidential year, than the perennial laying down and taking up of pipes. “He was really ripe for une grande affaire du cœur,” said one of his club friends, he was getting so lonesome. He did fall quite entirely in love, precipitately, unquestionably, in spite of the fact that they took the house for a boarding-place! They asked to hire but one room only.
When they arrived, at 4 P.M., they sat a few moments in the reception-room, while the chalk-faced, alert maid announced them to Archibald in the room above. Miss Perkins folded her faded, gloved hands in her lap and sat up on the sofa stiffly. They had looked at ever so many houses, and they had come back to No. 41 with instinctive preference.
“I don’t think one room would be so very expensive,” said Miss Perkins. “He could put up two beds easily in that north room, and the room we saw on Thirty-fourth Street was only twelve dollars—what do you think, Elvira?”
“I think twelve dollars is altogether too high,” said the niece, looking up from a delicate little Elzevir she was holding. “I think he wants to let the rooms very much; none of them seem to be taken. Remember it is midsummer, aunt dear.”